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Lincoln businesses will be getting some unique holiday calls, asking for their help. These calls will be from some of their peers. Lincoln's Partnership for Economic Development, which is run by the Chamber of Commerce for the city, is asking business leaders to chip in financially themselves, and convince other businesses that Lincoln needs to invest more in economic development efforts.
Tuesday is their first day of public efforts. Business leaders from across the city spent the morning, gathered at the LPED offices to learn how this will work, and then to begin making calls.
"Our business has operated here for nearly 25 years," says Senior Technologies founder John Brash, "Its very important to me that the city continue to develop and be prosperous."
Lincoln usually spends $550,000 a year on economic development. That money includes everything from salaries for economic development employees to advertising. But Lincoln has been urged by consultants to boost that spending. The goal of this fund-raising by LPED is to eventually increase total spending to $900,000.


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By Greg Bartlett
Insurance companies have long recognized the value of GPS tracking in aiding the recovery of stolen vehicles. In fact, most insurance companies offer substantial savings to their customers in the form of lower premiums if they have a GPS device installed in their insured vehicles. Allstate Auto Insurance Company is now going a step further in an all out effort to reduce the number of car thefts that take place in this country. They are donating cars equipped with a great deal of high tech equipment, including hidden cameras, GPS technology, and remote kill switches, to 14 cities in the nation that have a high rate of automobile theft.
Nobody but the local police forces in these cities will know what make or model of car is set up as a bait car. The goal is to put a car in a position where it will be tempting to would-be thieves. As soon as the car goes into motion, the GPS tracking device alerts police nearby who can attempt to stop the car. If the thieves attempt to flee, the officers can trigger a remote kill switch that will shut down the car’s engine and effectively stop it. The GPS data log and the images recorded by hidden cameras will be used as evidence when the case goes to court.
This is a more proactive approach to the use of GPS tracking in the deterring of car thefts. However, if the bait car is tempting enough, thieves may find themselves hooked and reeled in with record ease because of the ability of police to locate the car and follow its movements, no matter what time of day or night the theft occurs.
GPS auto tracking has been used as a tool for tracking and recovering stolen cars for quite some time now. In this case, the technology is being used as a deterrent and a method of catching thieves by placing bait in front of them and making the catch when they attempt to steal the car rather than waiting until after the damage is done. And, of course, this program is sponsored by a large insurance company who has a vested interest in reducing the number of cars stolen as a step to reducing the number of dollars they pay out each year in claims that arise from vehicle thefts and damages that occur as a result of thefts.

domain: news


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By Jeffry Bartash, MarketWatch
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — When Federal Reserve bigwigs put the economy on the couch this week, they’ll see a nation held back by so-so consumer spending, lukewarm hiring trends and lackluster business investment.
If they had a magic elixir, they would have used it by now. They don’t.
Top U.S. central bankers will meet in Washington on Tuesday and Wednesday to scope out the economic landscape. A day later, the government will release the key retail sales report for November.
|July 29||Consumer confidence||85.0||85.2|
|Aug. 1||Nonfarm payrolls||230,000||288,000|
|Aug. 1||Unemployment rate||6.0%||6.1%|
|Aug. 1||Personal income||0.4%||0.4%|
|Aug. 1||Consumer spending||0.5%||0.2%|
|Aug. 1||Consumer sentiment||81.7||81.3|
|Aug. 1||Construction spending||0.4%||0.1%|
|Aug. 1||Motor vehicle sales||16.7 mln||16.9 mln|
“Retail sales matter, but the Fed is the biggest event of the week,” said Kate Warne, investment strategist at the brokerage Edward Jones.
Investors aren’t expecting any ground-shaking results, however. The Fed is not expected to change its policy of buying mortgage-backed securities in an effort to lower consumer interest rates, though they may announce a supplemental bond-buying program.
Nor are retail sales likely to explode to the upside.
Here comes the Fed
The first batch of data arrives on Tuesday with the release of wholesale trade, the U.S. trade deficit and a report that calculates how many job openings exist in the U.S. None of the reports tend to be market-moving, though the trade data does figure into estimates for quarterly U.S. growth.
Instead, Wall Street will focus on the regular meeting of top Fed officials that starts Tuesday and extends into Wednesday.
Fed officials want to see a big improvement in hiring and faster U.S. growth before they ease up on their controversial program of buying debt.
The latest employment report for November, however, won’t sway the Fed. The U.S. added a modest 146,000 jobs last month, the government said Friday. That’s roughly the same amount the U.S. has created each month since the start of 2011. Read about job creation in November.
The unemployment rate, meanwhile, did fall to 7.7% from 7.9%, but that was because more people dropped out of the labor force. Usually that’s not a good sign because it means jobs are harder to find.
“The Fed has said that is not acceptable,” said economist John Canally of LPL Financial. “The status quo does not count as substantial and sustained improvement.”
Ultimately the Fed wants to see the jobless rate fall to 6% or less — the same levels that prevailed before the devastating 2007-2009 recession.


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Every year, on National Believe Day, Macy's and Make-A-Wish® come together to grant over fifty wishes from children all across the country.
We are proud to have participated in this year's Macy's Believe Together campaign that took place on Friday, December 12th at their Mayfair Mall location.
This year's wish was granted to a young man named Joseph, whose wish was to have a Hollywood-style shopping spree.
We provided shirts to the cheering crowd with Joseph's likeness to help give his wish a special boost. Joseph looked like a true rock star and we were fortunate to be part of his special day. Check out our photos of the event on our Facebook page.


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Traditionally, the holiday season is a time for giving — and the millions of new phones and tablets that will be given as gifts create a massive opportunity for developers to capture lots of new loyal users for their apps.
But it’s not all good news.
While the holidays clearly power massive app downloads and in-app purchases, many app developers can’t access their earned revenues quickly enough to invest in critical user acquisition campaigns that will allow them to ride the wave of their success well into the new year.
This is a dangerous disconnect if we consider just how important — and lucrative— the holidays season is for your app. When the iPhone 5s was released in 2013, daily app downloads increased by a whopping 70% in the few days after release, a trend that continued well into the holidays. In fact, 2013 was the biggest Christmas yet for mobile app downloads, according to Flurry, a mobile analytics, monetization, and advertising company. It found downloads were up 91% on Christmas day, compared to an average day in December. Overall, app downloads increased by 11% on Christmas 2013 compared to Christmas 2012.
Despite some evidence that the Christmas download spike is diminishing over time as the app market matures and globalizes, analysts are bullish about the outlook for app downloads over the holidays (particularly in view of the successful launches of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, along with the release of Apple’s new mobile operating system iOS 8).
They even expect Apple to set a new sales record during this holiday shopping season. At KGI Securities, analysts are betting Apple will sell 71 million iPhones, while others reckon it will be closer to 65 million as users migrate to the iPhone 6. But even if Apple reach that number, which is larger than the total population of the UK, it is more than enough reason for app developers to be positive about the outlook for their app business over the holiday season. And that’s not even factoring in the tremendous impact from the raft of new Samsung devices on the market.
Connect the dots, and the activity and excitement among new users centered on exploring the wealth of apps for their devices means a boom time for both user acquisition campaigns and click-through rates on mobile ads. It’s why app store analytics companies report mobile click-through rates build throughout the holiday season and peak on New Year’s Day, when CTRs can jump as much as 37 percent over the yearly average.
But, as I said, it’s not all good news.
As the number of apps grows, so does the average cost per install (CPI). App marketing technology provider Fiksu claims that cost of user acquisition is rising through the roof, driven by a variety of market factors that range from the release of Apple’s new mobile operating system iOS 8 to big brands paying big bucks to buy real estate on a consumer smartphone.
As a result, the costs associated with retaining a “loyal user” – that is, someone who opens an app three times or more – is a metric that has jumped 21% to reach $2.25 in September 2014, up from $1.86 in August. Year-over-year, the figure has risen by 34%, and Fiksu says costs are sure to skyrocket during the holiday season ahead — a boom period it notes has become longer and now extends well past the New Year and into February.
But even a longer holiday season can’t help app developers win big if they can’t unlock their revenues to invest rapidly in user acquisition campaigns to achieve and maintain the high visibility needed in the app stores to acquire (and keep) valuable users for the app.
Granted, the holiday season is both the most expensive and rewarding time of the year to market apps. But is also the most challenging as many app developers, waiting up to 60 days to get paid for their app sales or in-app purchases from the leading app stores, run out of steam. Unable to unlock the revenues they have earned and rapidly reinvest these funds into paid advertising campaigns, many app developers must watch as their holiday hits end up on the heap.
In fact, new data (based on internal research by Pollen VC in collaboration with Priori Data, a mobile application market analytics company) shows that both daily downloads and revenues for app developers post-feature fizzle out within a matter of a few weeks. Simply put, app revenues tend to plummet inside of just 30 days — precisely the period that app developers need the liquidity and flexibility to double-down on user acquisition in order to boost their profile and their downloads.
To plug this ‘funding gap’, the critical period between the time that an app developer chalks up an app sale or in-app purchase and the actual date that app stores pay out, app developers are faced with a tough choice. They can either deploy their venture funding to acquire more users, or they can watch as their leading app slips into the ranks of the ‘also-rans’.
Both are suboptimal outcomes since it’s common sense that spending VC cash, rather than unlocking app store revenues, to acquire users for apps is a risky business. For VCs, it’s an inefficient way to deploy capital. For startups, it’s an approach that is needlessly dilutive, forcing them to hand over more equity (and control) when there are clearly other options.
This is where (and why) app developers would benefit from a new model, one that would allow app developers to unleash receivables to rapidly reinvest in user acquisition campaigns and take their apps to the all-important ‘next level’.
There is now a solution to this problem. One where App developers can partner with firms that will help them access revenues they’ve already earned from the app store within 7 days, rather than the usual 30-60 days. Independent developers often face problems getting credit terms from the ad networks, which means that even if they do have the funds, there are limits on the amount of paid advertising they can purchase through self-serve, especially if they have to purchase with a credit card. To remove these credit barriers, certain firms can work with top ad networks to enable their clients’ to channel their app store revenues directly into user acquisition and help remove these credit barriers.
A more flexible model, one that would allow app developers to reinvest their revenues in user acquisition campaigns, would ultimately permit app developers to prolong their success long past the holiday season, and rise to new heights in 2015.
Becky is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at TUNE. Before TUNE, she led a variety of marketing and communications projects at San Francisco startups. Becky received her bachelor's degree in English from Wake Forest University. After living nearly a decade in San Francisco and Seattle, she has returned to her home of Charleston, SC, where you can find her enjoying the sun and salt water with her family.


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Leaks have claimed that a PS5 Pro is currently in the works at Sony, and could be targeting a late 2024 launch.
We’re over two years into the lifecycle of the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and though it feels like the console generation is only just getting started, there are some who have started wondering whether there are more powerful variants of the current hardware waiting in the wings. After all, it was around this point in the previous generation that we got the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X- so could something similar be in the cards for this generation as well?
Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, certainly seems to thinks so. When asked recently by GamesIndustry.biz whether he thinks we will see a PS5 Pro and similar mid-gen hardware upgrade for the current crop of console, Zelnick said, “We probably will”, before adding they one way or another mid-gen refreshes don’t “affect [Take-Two’s] business very much”.
Though Zelnick’s answer was brief, it does seem to be aligning what recent reports have claimed. Allegedly, Sony is currently at work on a PS5 Pro with a target launch window of late 2024 in mind, while developers will allegedly begin getting developer kits for the more powerful hardware in the near future as well. Reports of a similar Xbox upgrade have been few and far in between, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see both consoles coming out with new and more powerful hardware in the coming couple of years.


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Mashups using the same API (434)
Resource for hikers that combines Amazon product data with online resources for camping and trail information.
Agenzy.com is a comparison shopping site that has products from 4,000 stores. Shoppers can also save money by searching hot deals and coupons, free shipping deals, shopping the sale page and other...
Genuitec, LLC, an enterprise Java and mobile development tools provider, has announced the full integration of Cloud APIs and enhanced REST Services in MyEclipse 2014 Workbench. Previous releases of MyEclipse provided developers with only limited REST services support. The release of MyEclipse 2014 provides developers the ability to generate REST services using simple click-through wizards.
The New York Times have just announced their latest web service API: TimesPeople. With this new API, the newspaper of record is giving developers access to their own Times-centric social network. This community feature, launched last spring, lets readers connect via their interest in the paper's content. The TimesPeople API now provides access to TimesPeople data for any user, including their profile, activities, news feed and social network (our TimesPeople profile).
Following last July’s beta-release, Contentful has now moved into full General Availability this week. The platform-agnostic, API-driven content management service allows content producers and app developers to deliver composable blocks of content on any device. The Contentful API is already being used internationally by brand names and media partners, and has perked the interest of Adam Wiggins, Founder of Heroku, who recently joined Contentful’s Advisory Board. Founder Sascha Konietzke spoke to ProgrammableWeb about some of the latest API features.
||This API is an open source technology that interacts with the CS-Cart store and is available using PHP/MySQL and Smarty. It will work with Windows and Unix-like operating systems, however, it is...||eCommerce||09.19.2016|
||The Nativefier API allows developers to turn any site into a native application. Authored by Jia Hao, Nativefier makes it easier to create a desktop application for any website with minimal...||Tools||09.18.2016|
||The Knewin News API allows developers to access structured news content that has been aggregated from blogs, websites, and printed media from around the world. Knewin provides millions of news...||News Services||09.11.2016|
||The Rooftop CMS API facilitates the construction of apps that are responsive to cross-platform and multi-language content management environments. It is essentially a WordPress solution that...||Content Management||09.03.2016|
||The Fomo API allows developers to integrate social proof into their websites and apps to increase the rate of on-page conversions. Fomo can display recent customer actions - such as purchases,...||Marketing||08.31.2016|


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SEATTLE, Aug. 22, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Black Rapid Inc. was named in Inc. magazine's 500 Fastest-Growing Small Businesses list. The company's revenues have grown 1,281 percent in the past three years, placing them second among companies headquartered in Seattle (fifth in the Puget Sound), number 23 in the Consumer Products and Services category and 285 overall among U.S. companies.
"For more than 30 years, Inc has celebrated the fastest-growing private companies in America. To be honored this year is a particularly notable achievement," said Inc. Editor in Chief, Eric Schurenberg. "To rank among the 2012 Inc. 500, the company had to thrive through three of the toughest years this economy has seen in living memory."
In January 2008, BlackRapid revolutionized the camera strap by introducing the patented R-strap camera sling line, the "Original Camera Sling." The innovative system's benefits and convenience appealed to photographers looking for a better solution to the discomfort associated with cumbersome conventional camera straps. With increasing revenues, the company expanded its strap line in January 2010 and began global distribution. Today, BlackRapid distributes straps, bags and accessories in over 50 countries around the world and continues to expand its distribution force and product lines.
"I have watched BlackRapid evolve from a start-up with a good idea, developed by photographer and BlackRapid founder Ron Henry, into a respected brand in the photography community with a loyal following around the world," said Dan Ballard, renowned global travel and landscape photographer.
In 2011, ThinkGlobal, in conjunction with U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, honored BlackRapid with the Exporter of the Year award in the consumer goods category for significant contributions to growth in US exports and the creation of job opportunities. BlackRapid and its products have received numerous other awards globally for innovation, customer relations, superior quality and design.
"Being named to the Inc. 500 list is a tremendous validation of what we've created over the past few years," said BlackRapid President, Kurt Peterson. "Distributors and dealers across the globe have played a large part in helping BlackRapid achieve this notable accomplishment, as well as our global community of photographers who use and believe in our products. We are proud to create job opportunities in the United States and abroad during these economically challenging times and look forward to additional sustained growth in the coming years."
BlackRapid is the premier camera accessory brand, offering products designed to improve the speed, comfort and efficiency of consumer and professional photographers. In addition to the popular R-strap series camera sling strap, the company also offers the popular SnapR camera bag line and the timesaving LensBling Lens Cap System. Based in Seattle, WA, Founder and photographer Ron Henry established BlackRapid in 2008, with co-owner and BlackRapid President, Kurt Peterson.
Brent Camara, Porter Novelli


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Coinbase opened its NFT market to the general public on Wednesday after amassing a waiting list of nearly 2.8 million people. The launch coincided with the announcement of the crypto exchange Kraken that opens a waiting list for its own NFT market. They are all designed to compete with dominant markets such as OpenSeabut they depend on a fundamental question: are NFTs still in demand?
Not according to The Wall Street Journal, which declares On Tuesday, “the NFT market is collapsing,” citing transaction data from a website called NonFungible. However, Tom Schmid, a partner in the crypto venture capital firm Capital of Dragonflyproposed in a tweet that this data is incorrect and that the data of Dune Analyticsblockchain analysis platform proved the opposite.
“Dune is the easiest way to query blockchain data (scraped directly from an Ethereum node) and when we do, we can see that the data reported by Ethereum itself is significantly different from what Nonfungible reports,” he told me. Schmid on Wednesday via Twitter via direct message.


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Charlotte Black, a 61-year-old Dallas resident, won $1 million from an Extreme Green scratch-off ticket she bought at the Grands convenience store at 6435 Hiram Douglasville Highway in Powder Springs.
“It feels wonderful,” Black, a housewife, mother and grandmother, told the Georgia Lottery.
Black scratched the ticket in the store’s parking lot and went inside to confirm the news, according to a release from the Georgia Lottery. The release does not say when the ticket was purchased, but the photo handed out with the announcement includes a big check with a date of March 24.
Representatives from the lottery were not immediately available.
“It’s a good thing the store wasn’t crowded because I was screaming,” Black said.
Black and her husband, David, a Georgia Power control wireman, are deciding how to use the winnings.


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Trade marks protect your brand and help customers locate your goods/services in the marketplace. But what happens when someone else uses your trade mark, or a name similar to yours?
Let’s look at a few trade mark infringement showdowns to see what we can learn:
1. Ugg-ly Boots Brawl
One of the more recent trade mark infringement tiffs Down Under starred American titan Deckers Outdoor Corporation and Australian underdog, Luda Production. The battle? Ugg boots!
Luda had been crafting these beloved sheepskin delights for decades, but alas, didn’t trade mark the name ‘UGG’. Capitalising on the global popularity of these boots, Deckers swooped in and snagged the rights and then actively pursued companies such as Luda’s to stop them from selling goods under this name.
Despite Luda’s history with the term, they got the boot and had to cough up $450,000 in damages.
2. Burger Brouhaha
In-N-Out, the mighty American burger chain, sued an Australian burger business, In & Out Aussie Burgers.
A similar name and logo had In-N-Out US crying foul, alleging deception and a free ride on their success. This wasn’t In-N-Out US’s first rodeo, previously winning a case against Melbourne-owned Down-N-Out burgers.
The line between inspiration and imitation blurred, as the Federal Court weighed in. Despite having no local presence in Australia, In-N-Out US was successful once again.
3. Fried Chicken Fiasco
Louis Vuitton, famous for high fashion, took on an unexpected adversary: a South Korean fried chicken joint called Louis Vuiton Dak.
The court ruled against the fried chicken takeaway shop, declaring the name and logo too close for comfort.
In an act of defiance or some might say, plain stupidity, the restaurant then changed its name to LOUISVUI TONDAK. The Court wasn’t impressed and gave them a $US14.5 million slap on the wrist!
4. Apple Duel
Behold the colossal clash of Apples. The dispute between music business Apple Corps (owned by the Beatles) and tech giant, Apple Inc, has raged for years, starting back in 1978.
The original fight between the two was settled out of court, and an agreement was entered into whereby Apple Inc agreed to ‘Let it Be’ and stay out of the music business. Well, the peace didn’t last long! With the launch of iTunes some years later, Apple Corps sued Apple Inc. again, saying they breached the original agreement. To resolve this, Apple Inc. agreed to purchase Apple Corps trade mark rights.
Millions of dollars have changed hands in the 40-plus years since this trade mark dispute began, but things have been quiet for while. We’ll see if that continues.
5. Superhero Showdown
Who knew ‘superhero’ could spark such drama? While many trademark requests are declined due to them being too generic, it may surprise you to learn that ‘superhero’ is owned jointly by DC Comics and Marvel.
How did they both end up with the trade mark? Apparently, realising the costs involved with battling each other and the risk that neither party would end up with ownership, they agreed to own it together instead and agree that each could register it.
Anti-competitive you might ask? We would never say that!
6. Katy v Katie
You may have read our recent article about the fight between Katie Perry (Australian designer) and Katy Perry (US singer).
The case didn’t end well for Ms Katy, and she was found to have infringed the Australian designer’s trade mark rights when she advertised and sold tour merch / clothing for a number of Australian concerts.
7. Kylie vs. Kylie
This is another one of those name fights. In a twist of pop culture, Kylie Minogue and Kylie Jenner faced off.
Jenner tried to trade mark ‘Kylie’ in her quest for world domination, but Minogue intervened. The dispute hinged on ownership and potential confusion, with Minogue’s long-standing brand clashing with Jenner’s cosmetic aspirations. The reportedly richest Kardashian reached a confidential settlement with Ms Minogue that allowed Kylie cosmetics to trade.
Lodestar Legal are trade mark experts. We advise on registering your trade mark, and help protect your valuable brands. Call us to discuss protecting your trade mark.


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November 1st, 2007
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[Update: Rolling out now] Xiaomi Redmi 8A MIUI 12 update may release in August
This story is being continuously updated…. New updates are being added at the bottom…..
Original story (published on July 8, 2020) follows:
Xiaomi’s MIUI skin over Android is arguably one of the better OEM skins out there. The feature-packed skin gives users the option to personalize almost all corners of the interface. Moreover, it has some useful features that make life a lot easy.
The latest version of the custom skin is MIUI 12. It is being rolled out to several devices and the Redmi Note 8 Pro is one of the latest to receive it. The company often releases at least two or more MIUI updates for most of its smartphones.
With the Redmi Note 8 Pro MIUI 12 update released, Xiaomi can shift focus to other devices in the pipeline. And the Redmi 8A appears to be one of the next devices in line. According to new information, the device could get the latest MIUI skin as early as next month.
A user took to the Mi Community forums to seek a response to the question regarding the arrival of MIUI 12 on the Redmi 8A. In response to this question, a member from the Device team suggested that the update may arrive in August. Here is the comment from the Device team member:
No ETA given from official source. But probably next month.
If the Device team member’s statement is to be believed, Redmi 8A users only have to wait a few more weeks to get the MIUI 12 update. Furthermore, we also reported that the Redmi 8A Dual could get the Android 10 update shortly. This could also mean that the Redmi 8A will receive the Android 10 update soon.
Unfortunately, the Redmi 8A is unlikely to get the Android 11 update. Therefore, the device may only receive newer MIUI updates based on Android 10 in the future.
Nonetheless, you can check out our MIUI 12 update tracker to know when it will release for your device.
Update 1 (September 02)
IST: 02:11 pm: The MIUI 12 update for the Redmi 8A was expected to rollout in the month of August, and it did not happen. Now a Mi Community Mod has revealed that there is no ETA for the rollout.
Update 2 (September 08)
IST: 03:07 pm: It seems that Redmi 8A users will have to continue waiting for the MIUI 12 update to arrive since Xiaomi appears to have re-released the Android 10 update alongside MIUI 11 for the device in China. Head here for more details.
Update 3 (October 12)
IST: 02:30 pm: A new report (In Chinese) suggests that the stable MIUI 12 update for the Redmi 8A may be arriving shortly and the beta stable ROM should be released soon.
Update 4 (January, 09, 2021)
IST: 11:30 am: The Redmi 8A devices in China and Europe are now fetching the MIUI 12 update. Following is the update changelog as well as the download links:
Optimization: Full screen gestures are now ignored on the Lock screen alarm page
Updated Android Security Patch to December 2020. Increased system security.
Optimization: Animations in selected scenes
New: Swipe down from the upper left corner to open Notification shade and from the upper right corner to open Control center
Optimization: Control center is now closed by incoming calls
Optimization: Control center layout in landscape mode
Fix: Control center wasn’t always displayed correctly in landscape mode
Optimization: Brightness and color improvements for wallpapers in Dark mode
[Status bar, Notification shade]
Fix: Notification shade wasn’t displayed correctly in Dark mode
- Device: Redmi 8A
- Codename: olivelite
- Channel: Stable Beta
- Version: V22.214.171.124.QCPCNXM/V126.96.36.199.QCPEUXM
- Android: 10
PiunikaWeb started as purely an investigative tech journalism website with main focus on ‘breaking’ or ‘exclusive’ news. In no time, our stories got picked up by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and many others. Want to know more about us? Head here.


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Microsoft has cooked up a version of its Outlook email app for the Apple Watch.
Launched on Thursday, the latest version of Outlook for iOS supports the Apple Watch with several useful features. You can glance at your email, receive notifications of new email and use preset replies to respond to an email.
Though Microsoft sells its own smartwatch -- the Android Wear mobile OS for wearables. Microsoft already offers such apps as PowerPoint, OneDrive, Skype and Translator for both the Apple Watch and Android Wear devices. The strategy is part of Microsoft's goal of expanding its software and services beyond just Windows in an attempt to win over more customers.-- the company has been eager to support the Apple Watch as well as smartwatches that use Google's
And the Apple Watch can also use all the apps it can get. Apps are the key to the success of a mobile device, be it a smartphone, a tablet or a smartwatch. The Apple Watch has, Apple CEO Tim Cook boasted in late July. That's up from around 3,500 during the device's initial launch three months prior. But the Watch also needs more apps that can work independently without needing to communicate with a paired smartphone. And that's a goal Apple is trying to achieve with .
"This new version will have great new capabilities and bring native apps right to your wrist," Cook said in June.
In the meantime, the new Outlook app for the Apple Watch offers users three key features as touted in Microsoft's description:
1. Get a quick glance of what's happening in your Outlook Inbox or what's next in your calendar just by swiping up from the Watch face.
2. Need more context? Catch up with unread emails during your busy day right from the Outlook Watch App. When it's really urgent, just reply directly from your watch with the set of replies we've pre-written just for you. We also have emojis and voice dictation if you're more that kind of person.
3. Never miss what's really important to you. Get notified of important emails and take action immediately thanks to our custom notifications. Archive that. Schedule this for later. It's easy as 1, 2, 3.
And for those of you who use the Outlook app but don't have an Apple Watch, Microsoft promised "plenty of cool new features coming your way very soon."
(Via The Verge)


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GVC Holdings has forecast a 13 per cent year-on-year growth in net gaming revenue for 2017.
UK.- GVC said NGR should come in at €1 billion in the 12 months through to December 31, 2017, while underlying NGR growth is set to climb 18 per cent year-on-year.
Clean earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) is also expected to be at the top end of expectations.
The forecast growth following a strong fourth quarter performance that saw NGR amount to €279.5m, the largest quarterly figure since the purchase of bwin.party in February 2016.
NGR in Q4 also increased by 31 per cent, resulting in the biggest rise since the bwin.party acquisition.
The trading update comes after GVC last month agreed terms to acquire Ladbrokes Coral.
“I’m delighted to report another strong year for the group with underlying NGR growth of 18 per cent, reflecting the strength of our brands, technology and the hard work of our talented people,” said Kenneth Alexander, chief executive of GVC.
“We have once again demonstrated our ability to integrate significant acquisitions, realise material synergies and at the same time deliver top line growth.
“The recommended transaction with Ladbrokes Coral Group presents an exciting opportunity for both sets of shareholders, creating a global gaming group with a portfolio of strong brands across all major regulated online markets, together with proprietary technology and proven management.”


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A perfect storm of supply and demand factors has prompted the electronics industries to start hoarding semiconductors. This obfuscates how big the imbalance between supply and demand really is.
Toyota recently joined a long list of car manufacturers that have been forced to scale down their production output due to a chip shortage. For want of a chip, hundreds of thousands of cars will not be made this year. The supply glut will cut almost 61 billion dollars in revenue from the global automotive industry in 2021, consulting firm Alixpartners estimates.
But it’s not just the car industry that’s suffering. The new Playstation 5 and Xbox consoles will be in short supply until at least the second half of the year. Nvidia is struggling to get enough GPUs that power its graphics cards. Qualcomm can’t keep up with the demand for smartphone processors. Its customer Samsung, warning about a “serious imbalance” in the semiconductor market, is postponing the launch of its flagship smartphone. Even mighty Apple is forced to push out an iPhone release.
In fact, a broad spectrum of chips is getting tougher to find. “Around 500 components used in all of our product portfolios are impacted by the supply shortage issue,” Advantech executive Miller Chang told investors recently. The world’s largest maker of industrial computers noted that lead times for some components, such as audio codec chips and microcontrollers, have gone beyond 50 weeks. Power management chips, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and LCD drivers have a waiting time of over 20 weeks.
With lead times already at high levels and still increasing, panic buying and double ordering ensues, further squeezing capacity and driving up costs. “It’s a bit like everyone is crazily buying and hoarding toilet paper in a crisis. Everyone is fighting for resources at the same time, and I don’t see a turning point coming yet,” Advantech CEO Ko-Chen Liu said. Many CEOs and analysts concur.
Back of the line
Of course, all this is nothing new: the semiconductor industry is notoriously cyclical. It’s impossible to smoothly balance supply and demand because there’s hardly any flexibility in chip manufacturing capacity. Since the cost of manufacturing essentially equals capital costs, all available capacity is utilized as much as possible. Expanding capacity is a carefully planned process that takes years to realize and only a very rich fool would keep some spare capacity around just in case demand increases. Anyone who buys semiconductors knows this, which is why they’re twitchy about lead times or prices increasing.
The current upswing in demand is a particularly dramatic one. Normally, overall semiconductor revenue drops going into the new year, but this January, it actually rose 1.6 percent compared to the month before. According to investment bank UBS, that’s 11 percentage points above the typical seasonal pattern.
So why this chip crunch, why now? The most-cited cause is the pandemic, which fueled demand for working, studying and enjoying oneself at home. For example, the PC was supposed to be dying, but market intelligence firm IDC clocked a 12.9 percent year-on-year increase of PC unit shipments – the highest growth in ten years. And despite supply chain constraints due to virus-mitigating measures, global consumer electronics revenue increased 7 percent last year, according to Strategy Analytics.
But there’s more to it. Many companies started hoarding semiconductor devices as early as May last year, when the US government announced restrictions for any company using American technology supplying Huawei. Additional limitations imposed in September on the world’s fifth-largest foundry, SMIC, exacerbated the uncertainty the US-China trade tensions are creating in the semiconductor market.
In some markets outside the leading-edge realm, fab capacity was already tight, to begin with. All those computers, tablets and 5G smartphones require heaps of ‘humble’ chips to function, such as analog, RF and MEMS devices, display drivers and power management ICs. Many of these are fabbed on 200mm wafers, and 200mm fab capacity has been in short supply since 2015. Device makers have been slow to expand capacity, partly because of an equipment shortage. Ever since the mid-2020 rebound, demand for (second-hand) 200mm tools has been surging, according to NH Investment & Securities.
Finally, incidental occurrences are also contributing to the current supply-demand imbalance. With bitcoin’s price soaring, GPUs used for crypto mining have been flying off the shelves. Power outages following a fierce winter storm in Texas forced chip plants of Samsung, NXP and Infineon to shut down. In the automotive sector, the current shortage is partly the result of poor planning: companies were quick to cancel and slow to reorder, putting the automotive supply chain at the back of the line at foundries. Recently, water shortages for Taiwan’s chip factories are making people nervous, too.
It will take a while before things start to settle. Though estimates vary, the consensus among industry watchers seems to be that supply will have caught up with demand in 3-4 quarters. Another 1-2 quarters will be spent to replenish inventories at customers and distribution channels. It might not be a bad idea to start Christmas shopping early this year if you’ve got your heart set on a specific gadget, because prices are likely to rise and some products might be hard to find.
On the other hand, some are already worried about a bust. Hoarding may have created ‘phantom’ demand, causing excess inventories and supply gluts in the future. “While things appear red-hot for semis in the short term, we’re growing more cautious over the long-term outlook as we believe the industry may be over-shipping to true demand,” analyst Chris Rolland at Susquehanna warned in a recent note to investors.


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Khronos Ships OpenGL 4.4, OpenCL 2
Standards, and Apple’s relationship to them, are funny things. Whereas Safari is something of a leader vis-a-vis the unfinished HTML5 spec and the just published 802.11ac wi-fi in the 2013 MacBook Air is fairly cutting edge, Apple is perennial follower when it comes to most system-level standards — OpenGL being a case in point.
Finally, OS X is finally adopting OpenGL 4.1 and OpenCL 1.2. That’s great.
Good news for the rest of us? Assuming past as prologue, probably not, at least not for some months if not years.
Get the Bigger Picture on the OS X 10.9 Facebook Page
First of all, Khronos just published the standards and, though people in labs (somewhere out there) have implemented OpenGL 4.4 and Open 2.0, it’s going to take time for mainline hardware and software vendors to bake the updates into their products.
Also, as noted in the lede, Apple’s a laggard vis-a-vis adopting system-level standards. For example, OS X 10.8.4 uses OpenGL 3.2, which came out in 2009.
So, hurray for standards, and waiting…
What’s your take?


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The caution comes after officials from Tanzania Bureau of Standards (TBS) apprehended 9,844 packs of baby diapers from China with an estimated value of 12,859 US dollars (about 15m/-) imported by Yeh's Homewin Enterprises Ltd which operates shops at Kariakoo in Dar es Salaam.
Revealing the findings to this paper, TBS Senior Quality Assurance Officer, Mr Lazaro Msasalaga said the diapers were seized on arrival from China in December, last year and passed through several tests before being declared sub-standard.
"We seized this consignment late last year but since the importer kept insisting his cargo had obtained recommended quality requirements, we had to prove him wrong through a number of tests," he said.
According to him, out of three tests done on the samples between December, last year and March, this year, two of them tested negative failing parameters of absorptive capacity as well as marking and labelling.
"The tests showed that the diapers cannot absorb and hold the wastes as required hence causing problems to the skin of the babies which is particularly very sensitive," said Mr Msasalaga who is also the TBS Acting Head of Inspection.
Low or poor quality standards of diapers might pose serious risks to the delicate skin of babies and even the elderly, most of which are easily available in the local market.
A survey by this paper has shown that diapers are sold between 3,000/- and 4,000/- a piece. Mr Msasalaga, however, could not rule out the possibility of cheating in the process of importing the inferior cargo, since the particulars in the container's bill of landing showed it was imported by one Yeh's Hong Yuan International Tanzania Investment Ltd.
Following the seizure, the importer was instantly fined 3.5m/- including paying destruction costs totalling more than 2m/-. The diapers will be destroyed today at Pugu dumpsite.
This is the third time in less than a year TBS has been forced to destroy sub-standard goods following public outcry on the need for the bureau to impose stricter measures to importers of sub-standard products.
Last week, the Minister for Trade and Industries, Dr Abdallah Kigoda stressed on the need for the bureau to institute its full powers including implementing of the new law which calls for tougher action against culprits.
He also revealed that the ministry will start allocating a budget for TBS development expenditures which will assist in capacity building and establishment of zonal offices to speed up goods inspection operations.
Experts warn that although diapers make parenting so much easier, not all diapers have a positive effect on babies calling on a need to check whether they cause allergies to children as soon as they start using them. Parents are also advised to go for branded and known diapers that are of high quality although they may be costly.


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Bitcoin (BTC) may become the bread and butter for sandwich chain Quiznos in a pilot payment project that launches in August.
Quiznos is partnering with digital assets company Bakkt to accept Bitcoin payments through the Bakkt app. From mid-August, select Quiznos stores in Denver will accept BTC payments, including the high-traffic airport restaurant. New customers can get $15 worth of BTC by downloading the Bakkt app and using it to pay at Quiznos.
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What is the Bakkt app?
The Bakkt app is a digital wallet with a difference. You can link up everything, from your cryptocurrency assets to your loyalty points and manage all your accounts in one place.
One of Bakkt’s missions is to make it easy for consumers to transfer, trade, and pay with digital assets. People can use the app to:
- Pay in various stores
- Send money (or Bitcoin) to friends and family
- Buy and sell Bitcoin
- Buy and use gift cards
This cryptocurrency app not only lets you buy your Quiznos sandwich with Bitcoin, it can also convert your loyalty points into lunch money.
Bakkt also launched a Bakkt Visa® Debit Card earlier this year, which lets people spend their Bitcoin directly from the app.
Another small step toward mainstream adoption
Bakkt is making big strides toward facilitating Bitcoin payments. It also partners with Wyndham Hotels, Starbucks, and Best Buy. Put simply, it’s easier than ever to use Bitcoin as a form of payment.
These partnerships are important, but they don’t overcome one big obstacle toward widespread Bitcoin adoption: price volatility.
The Bakkt app makes it much easier for individual businesses because they receive instant payment in traditional money. Companies need to pay suppliers, rent, and salaries in traditional money, so accepting and holding Bitcoin could play havoc with their cash flow if the price fluctuates wildly.
From the customer side, many people are reluctant to spend their Bitcoin in case the price soars again in the coming months and years. Nobody wants to be that person who spent 10,000 BTC on a pizza back in 2010 (it would be worth over $400 million today). Many people see Bitcoin as more of a store of value — a kind of digital gold, which may put them off spending it on a sandwich.
It will be interesting to see how the pilot project in Denver goes. Nonetheless, every step toward the mainstream is good for Bitcoin. And Bakkt’s payment app may one day allow its customers to live their lives entirely in crypto.


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Weight administration startup Noom is now diving into the behavioral well being house with the launch of Noom Temper. The brand new platform was designed to assist people handle stress and anxious ideas, in addition to enhance well being habits.
Customers will have the ability to faucet into each day 10-minute classes primarily based on Cognitive Behavioral Remedy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioral Remedy (DBT) and Acceptance Dedication Concept (ACT). The brand new program additionally supplies customers with mindfulness strategies and instruments, and human teaching for steerage. Customers are additionally in a position to log their temper over time.
Noom mentioned it has expertise in behavioral well being as a result of its weight administration program is rooted in behavioral science.
“As a result of Noom is rooted in psychology, we have now helped thousands and thousands of customers understand the important connection between psychological wellness and bodily well being, and the impression each can have on the opposite,” Andreas Michaelides, chief of psychology at Noom, mentioned in a press release. “The launch of Noom Temper marks an thrilling new chapter for Noom to assist much more individuals unlock highly effective holistic well being outcomes.”
THE LARGER TREND
There’s a massive marketplace for behavioral well being instruments, as anxiousness is a typical situation. In a 2019 survey, 11.2% of U.S. adults expertise common emotions of fear, nervousness or anxiousness, according to the CDC.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic charges of hysteria skyrocketed. In line with the Kaiser Family Foundation, 4 in 10 adults within the U.S. reported signs of hysteria or depressive dysfunction.
“A stress-management product has been a high request from our Noom group,” Saeju Jeong, Noom cofounder and CEO, mentioned in a press release. “As consciousness grows across the significance of psychological well-being for dwelling a wholesome and completely satisfied life, Noom Temper fills an pressing hole for individuals who wish to enhance their relationship with stress.
“This system is simple to make use of anytime, anyplace, constructing customers’ confidence and empowering them to take management of their well being. Increasing our platform to incorporate Noom Temper is an enormous step towards leveraging our habits change experience throughout the well being spectrum whereas delivering elevated worth to our prospects.”
THE LARGER TREND
In Could, Noom raked in a whopping $540 million in Series F funding, which introduced its whole funding elevate to round $657.3 million. On the time of the funding, the corporate mentioned it was desirous about exploring new areas past weight reduction, together with stress, anxiousness, hypertension and sleep.
In the present day there are scores of psychological well being instruments on the digital well being market. Digital psychological well being was the primary funding in the course of the first half of 2021, in line with a Rock Health report. In truth, the report discovered that in the course of the first six months of the yr behavioral well being raked in $1.5 billion.


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Rating: **** 4/5 Stars. From a damaged, poorly-maintained Soviet-era monosynth that suffers from crackles, frequency drift and other problems, RR saw an opportunity to create an unusual polysynth...
Muse Research continue to refine their Receptor virtual instrument player.
This month we look at the new iPad Mini, Microsoft Surface and Borderlands Granular Synth app.
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Get our introductory offer at only
*$0.99/month for first 3 months
$29.90/month for the next 9 months
A RENEWED plunge in Chinese stock markets has stoked concerns among global investors about the health of the world's second-biggest economy, but there is little evidence that the outlook for China has darkened dramatically in recent weeks.
China's economy lost steam...


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Richland Center, WI (PRWEB) January 17, 2006
Quantum Fields LLC is promoting and selling “Pocket CO”, the world’s smallest carbon monoxide instrument via the Internet. Pocket CO is manufactured in Newark, California at Transducer Technology Inc (TTI). The handheld unit can detect low levels of carbon monoxide and has a digital display. It weighs less than 1.5 ounces and detects 0 – 600 ppm (parts per million). Researchers have found that chronic illness can be caused from prolonged low level CO exposure. Most home detectors by design don’t alarm over 100 ppm. Pocket CO displays low levels of CO.
Mary Maclay, CEO of Quantum Fields LLC, is currently finishing her MBA (2006) at Viterbo University, La Crosse Wisconsin, and her Research is a case study of low cost marketing methods. She is interested in marketing methods that utilize the efficiencies of the Internet. “Research shows that typically sales and marketing expenses for high technology companies can exceed research and development costs by a factor of 2,” explains Maclay.
“What if research companies could spend more on innovation and development?” asked Maclay. Her objective is to determine which methods are an efficient means of product exposure. Web site optimization alone is not the answer. Her business web site has been search engine optimized (SEO) for over a year, but this feature by itself, has produced limited sales. “We are now more actively distributing Internet press releases and contacting specific associations by email, and measuring resulting web traffic and sales," states Maclay
After using the Internet for information gathering, to determine a potential distributor of Pocket CO for the aviation marketplace, she chose to visit the distributor’s booth at the Oshkosh Air show personally. “I decided to meet in a face to face with Pocket CO in hand. The Internet saved me tremendous time and cost upfront, but I didn’t want to take the chance of an email rejection. That distributorship has been productive in sales," said Maclay.
Pocket CO inventor, Dr. Joseph Stetter is the president of California based TTI. “The project benefits from the fact that Pocket CO has incredible credentials surrounding it, with over 30 years of sensor experience combined with nanotechnology integration into a practical product," said Maclay.
Maclay is an entrepreneur, senior software engineer, and part time IT lecturer at the University of Wisconsin - Richland. She is CEO of Quantum Fields LLC, a contract research and development company in rural SW Wisconsin. She has a BSCS from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is an MBA candidate 2006 at Viterbo University in La Crosse Wisconsin.
For further information, contact:
Mary Maclay, President
Quantum Fields LLC
20918 Wildflower Ln
Richland Center, WI 53581
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CHIP DESIGNER AMD has said the memory architecture in its heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) will move management of CPU and GPU memory coherency from the developer's hands down to the hardware.
While AMD has been churning out accelerated processing units (APUs) for the best part of two years now, the firm's HSA is the technology that will really enable developers to make use of the GPU. The firm revealed some details of the memory architecture that will form one of the key parts of HSA and said that data coherency will be handled by the hardware rather than software developers.
AMD's HSA chips, the first of which will be Kaveri, will allow both the CPU and GPU to access system memory directly. The firm said that this will eliminate the need to copy data to the GPU, an operation that adds significant latency and can wipe out any gains in performance from GPU parallel processing.
According to AMD, the memory architecture that it calls HUMA - heterogeneous unified memory access, a play on unified memory access - will handle concurrency between the CPU and GPU at the silicon level. AMD corporate fellow Phil Rogers said that developers should not have to worry about whether the CPU or GPU is accessing a particular memory address, and similarly he claimed that operating system vendors prefer that memory concurrency be handled at the silicon level.
Rogers also talked up the ability of the GPU to take page faults and that HUMA will allow GPUs to use memory pointers, in the same way that CPUs dereference pointers to access memory. He said that the CPU will be able to pass a memory pointer to the GPU, in the same way that a programmer may pass a pointer between threads running on a CPU.
AMD has said that its first HSA-compliant chip codenamed Kaveri will tip up later this year. While AMD's decision to give GPUs access to DDR3 memory will mean lower bandwidth than GPGPU accelerators that make use of GDDR5 memory, the ability to address hundreds of gigabytes of RAM will interest a great many developers. AMD hopes that they will pick up the Kaveri chip to see just what is possible. µ
Scam was hiding in plain sight
Microsoft sticks fingers in ears and shouts 'la la la la la we can't hear you'
78 per cent of Q1 profits from gaming as tech behemoth continues slide
Firm hopes his expertise with QNX will provide direction


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Iceland’s festive film about the devastating effects of palm oil plantations has been named the UK’s favourite Christmas advert for 2018.
The TV commercial, an animated tale of an orangutan that has lost its home and family to deforestation, was released in collaboration with environmental organisation Greenpeace.
It was initially reported that the advert had been banned from TV for being “too political”.
However, advertising industry advisory body Clearcast later clarified this had been a “misunderstanding”, saying it could not be shown on TV due to the supermarket’s collaboration with Greenpeace, as opposed to the supposed political nature of the advert itself.
The research into the nation’s favoured Christmas adverts, which was conducted by YouGov’s ad testing service, assessed several factors, including which ones were liked the most and which were most in keeping with its brand’s identity.
According to the survey, four in five people said they liked Iceland’s advert, 83 per cent said they thought it stood out among others and 87 per cent found the message easy to comprehend.
Furthermore, three quarters of the public said they thought the advert was “believable”.
While the Iceland advert may have come out on top as the nation’s favourite, a minority of people (39 per cent) said they believe the film fit with the supermarket’s image.
Coming in second on the list of the UK’s most liked Christmas adverts was Sainsbury’s “The Big Night”, which sees an eight-year-old girl perform a rendition of the New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” while dressed as a star.
A total of 65 per cent of the British public said they like the advert, with 55 per cent also saying they thought it stood out.
In third place comes supermarket Aldi, whose advert saw the return of the anthropomorphic vegetable Kevin the Carrot.
Kevin the Carrot proved so popular with consumers that plush toys inspired by the character quickly sold out when they went on sale in store and online.
In fourth places comes McDonald’s’ depiction of Santa Claus trying to source carrots for his reindeers, closely followed by Boots’ mother-daughter tale in fifth place.
While Tesco may not have been placed in the UK’s top five Christmas adverts of 2018, its film about the diverse ways that families celebrate the festive period was named the most fitting for its brand, with 65 per cent of the public saying so.
A majority of people (60 per cent) said the same thing about Cadbury’s Christmas advert, which relays the trials and tribulations of trying to pull off Secret Santa smoothly.
While this year’s John Lewis advert may not have been its most popular, it did appear the most memorable, with 66 per cent of people saying they found it easy to remember.
Despite the fact the Iceland advert may have had the most impact on the nation since its release in early November 2018, YouGov states that Aldi’s Kevin the Carrot campaign was the most effective overall.
“The success of Aldi’s campaign here, along with its status as one of the most-liked, indicates it has been successful at telling an entertaining story while still effectively showcasing its products,” the market research company says.


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Go to the restaurant to eat, but the fear is, the food will be fresh! In order to avoid this fear, Google appears as a trio. If you eat food from a restaurant, food poisoning will probably announce in advance the search giant.
Google is trying to create a special machine learning algorithm with the University of Harvard in the United States. Through this, Google Search Analysis offers a list of restaurants that are deficient in food safety.
Researchers say it will provide information in potentially unsafe restaurants in the fastest possible time. The model is called a Finder or a real-time disease detector. In the first case they will look for specific topics such as bowel or diarrhea.
But no information was provided about how it will be launched. People go to different restaurants and speak their experiences with smartphones. Finder will collect data from all past history on the smartphone and explore it. This can be known about food shortages.
The researchers are conducting tests in 2016 and 2016 in Chicago and Las Vegas. They found that the rate of identification of unhealthy restaurants in two cities by technology is 52.3 percent.
In a regular campaign, the degree of identification of an unsecured restaurant is 22.7 percent. Google senior Reich Richard Scientist and co-author of the study, Evgeni Gabriłovich, said that we can use online data as a long-term and cost-effective method for improving public health.
Researchers believe that the health department can use the Finder Algorithm with an existing method for identifying unsafe restaurants. It's more effective than consumer complaints and existing campaign methods.


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Accessory maker Mad Catz is hoping to make your computer gaming experience a little more comfortable with the release of the first fully adjustable high performance gaming mouse, just announced at CES.
The new line is dubbed the Cyborg R.A.T. -- R.A.T. stands for Really Awesome Technology. No, really.
"For the first time ever on a mouse, the key points of contact between the gamer's hand and the mouse are fully adjustable allowing it to be customized for any grip preference," explained Darren Richardson, President and Chief Executive Officer of Mad Catz.
That's all great, but we really like it because it looks like it was ripped off the set of Battlestar Galactica.
There will be four incarnations of the Cyborg R.A.T. including a high-end wireless model with rechargeable lithium batteries. It's set to hit stores in the spring.


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Brazilian dealer center Hyundai officially hired a stray dog, who for a long time came to the car showroom.
According to the report of the car showroom in Instagram, the dog was called Tucson Prime. It has already received a work pass with a photo, as well as the tie of the showroom worker.
Also, the animal has its own Instagram. The new employee lives in the car showroom – a special booth was installed for him right in the hall.


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Due to the fact that the legacy chain (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) share a common address format to date, it has caused confusion and resulted in some users losing their money after sending BTC to a BCH address, and vice versa. In an effort to put an end to this problem, Bitcoin ABC’s lead developer Amaury Séchet is proposing a new address format for BCH, one that will make it incompatible with the BTC chain. This is reported by The Bitcoin News.
Using a new format will prevent users from mistakenly sending money on the wrong chain. It also accept payloads up to 512 bits which ensures we can deploy more secure way of doing multiparty smart contract in the future. Finally, it uses a version field ensuring we can encode new features in these addresses in the future without having to use a new format.
Lead developer, Bitcoin ABC
Thus, the new address format, called cashaddr, not only helps end the confusion. It also prepares the Bitcoin Cash system for further upgrades in the future, including multiparty smart contract.
The upgrade can be implemented easily and does not need a hard fork. Séchet is planing implementatio for January 14 —which is perfect as it avoids the Christmas holiday season, when transactions may be at its peak, while also being ahead of another holiday season, the Chinese new year which falls in February.


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Many artists continue leveraging non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to make life-changing revenues and passive incomes. Victor Langlois, a transgender teenage artist, is the latest perfect example, has made nearly $50 million in slightly over a year from the sale of his NFTs.
According to an exclusive report published by NBC News on June 6, the 19-year-old artist became famous after selling his physical artwork for $2.16 million last week at Christie’s auction house in New York.
Victor Langlois, also known as “FEWOCIiOUS,” auctioned his non-fungible tokens titled “Hello, I’m Victor, and This Is My Life,” which showcased his 14 to 18 childhood life and gender transition.
In April, Langlois made several more profile sales in NFT art, including selling nearly $20 million worth of digital art in 24 hours. The new report noted that his sales represented the third-largest in history for NFTs marketplace Nifty Gateway. While commenting about the NFT sales at the time, Langlois said:
“It’s been hard for me to process, to be honest. The dream isn’t to relax and do nothing, the dream is to draw.”
Langlois Showcases His Life Using NFTs
In his first NFT collection, Langlois focused on showcasing his life story from ages 14 to 18, including his experience in an abusive household and living with his grandparents in Las Vegas. At the time, Langlois said he was afraid to come out as transgender in a religious family.Buy Crypto Now
In a short interview with Christie Auction House in June 2021, Langlois revealed that his grandmother questioned his artistic pursuit, encouraging him to take a relatively more secure career path. He explained:
“To see me wanting to pursue art, she was like, ‘What? Be a lawyer.’ Which, I don’t understand. But it hurt when she would say, ‘Your art is ugly, and that’s why you can’t do it.’”
In December 2021, Langlois told Coinbase crypto exchange in an exclusive interview that NFTs had taught him that “art is not just a matter of painting.” On April 20, Coinbase announced launching its beta NFT marketplace version, “Coinbase NFT.”
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At the end of a crazy weather week for us on the East Coast, we thought we'd update everyone on the latest rumors and news regarding the 2013 Mustang and the 2015 Mustang.
Following up tolast week's post about the 2013 Mustang, we stumbled upon some 2013 Mustang spy photos for you to check out! This pre-production car was spotted out on the streets around Detroit.
Just a day after learning a lot more about the 2015 Mustang and 2014 Shelby GT500, we now have learned some details on a Mustang redesign/refresh due for the 2013 model year. While very little has been reported thus far on this refresh, we found some info we're able to share.
Yesterday, MotorTrend released their 2015 Ford Mustang First Look, which seems to confirm many of the rumors that we've been hearing about where the new Pony Car will be going.
We've shared a lot about the 2012 Roush Stage 3 Mustang over the last few weeks, including its "taking back of the pavement" and the car doing some laps of the Summit Point Raceway. But, what about the 2012 Stage 1 and Stage 2 Roush Mustang models?
For the fourth year in a row, Ford has created a one of a kind Mustang for a benefit auction at the EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin at the end of July.
© 2016 CJ Pony Parts. All Rights Reserved.


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Previously, Tesla suspended the option to purchase an electric vehicle with Bitcoin after adding the option in March. Elon Musk said that the move was due to concerns about the energy used to process Bitcoin payments using computing power in a process called mining. Now Musk says that Tesla might reinstate Bitcoin payments if Bitcoin miners can switch over to at least 50% “green” renewable energy in their mining operations.
Some cryptocurrency miners have called his concerns unwarranted. The excuse of energy usage could be a cover for lack of purchases of Tesla vehicles using Bitcoin, as it isn’t used for payments much anymore due to high transaction fees and the pressure to HODL, or hold on to Bitcoin in the hope that it will increase in value despite price moves that can seem like a roller coaster at times. A few miners did mention the irony that Tesla vehicles run on electricity despite investments in solar powered Supercharger stations and attempts to ramp up sales of the company’s Powerwall and Powerpack batteries.
Many Bitcoin miners already seek out inexpensive renewable energy sources to maximize their profits. Norway has reported increasing demand for renewable energy from owners of mining rigs that may put a strain on its ability to produce enough energy to meet the total demand, for instance.
Elon Musk has recently met with major North American cryptocurrency mining firms regarding energy usage, a move that led to the formation of the Bitcoin Mining Council. The Bitcoin Mining Council says that it will push for greater transparency in energy usage. However, it does not appear that Musk will play a major role in the new organization.
In the wake of Tesla’s suspension of Bitcoin payments, supporters of other cryptocurrencies have suggested that the company could add cryptocurrency options that use less energy to process payments. Dogecoin was one of the most popular suggestions, since Musk has previously promoted it on Twitter and in an SNL skit during his guest hosting gig.
Although Tesla previously revealed ownership of $1.5 billion in Bitcoin in recent regulatory filings, the company has since sold $272 million in “digital assets” to cover operating expenses. Musk says that some of the sales were an attempt to “confirm BTC could be liquidated easily without moving market.” It may or may not have worked, considering that Bitcoin and several major altcoins like Dogecoin have slid starting on the day that Musk appeared on SNL.
Musk’s tweeting about cryptocurrencies often has an impact on the market. Some cryptocurrency investors have accused him of manipulating crypto markets, just as the SEC has alleged that Elon Musk manipulated the value of Tesla stock through ill-considered tweets such as claiming that he could take Tesla private, something that he later admitted would be “impossible at current prices” in the wake of the stock’s 2020 gains.
Several members of Reddit’s cryptocurrency subreddits have suggested ignoring Musk as much as possible. However, Musk’s most recent comment appears to have had limited effect, as Bitcoin rose 8% on Sunday.
And, yes, Musk does still plan to send “DOGE-1” to the Moon.


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Xiaomi subsidiary YI Technology is launching a new 360-degree VR camera described as the first high-end live VR camera "for everyone." It's called the YI 360 VR Camera and is now available on pre-order terms for the price of $399. The unit is equipped with two 220-degree lenses with an f/2.0 aperture, backed by two of the same 12-megapixel Sony IMX377 image sensors employed by the YI 4K+ Action Camera launched in March.
As the moniker suggests, the YI 360 VR Camera is primarily designed for VR and 360-degree content, and thus it features a VR-ready Ambarella H2V95 system-on-chip. The unit is able to record videos in a resolution of up to 5.7K (5760 x 2880) at a rate of 30 frames per second and is capable of capturing and automatically stitching 360-degree VR videos in 4K resolution at 30 frames per second without requiring an external computer or added software. Coupled with the companion app for smartphones and 100mbps high-speed Dual-Band Wi-Fi support, the YI 360 VR Camera can also live stream videos with a maximum resolution of 2.5K directly onto platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. In addition to that, while the camera is connected to a smartphone, users can make use of an auto sync feature that will automatically save the photos captured with the device to the connected smartphone, ready to be shared on social media. YI Technology also said that the YI 360 VR Camera is equipped with a small OLED display which can be used to control it in conjunction with its physical buttons, and alternatively, users can also control the unit remotely via Bluetooth.
The YI 360 VR Camera is powered by an ultra-high-density 1,400mAh battery and the manufacturer promises up to 75 minutes of battery life while recording content in 4K resolution. The package itself is rather lightweight, tipping the scale at only six ounces (170 grams), meaning that the camera at hand is lighter than some of the larger smartphones currently on the market. The product is now available for pre-orders and unlike the Xiaomi Mi 360° Panoramic Camera launched a couple of months ago, the YI 360 VR Camera can be acquired online outside of China. Pre-orders are expected to start shipping to customers by the end of June.


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As the smartphone war rages between Samsung and Apple, the Korean manufacturer recently announced that its European line of cellphone would boast a new addition for its May launch: a 6.3 inches display model! It seems that it will feature a 720p screen resolution and a dual-core processor of 1.7GHz, coming with a RAM of 1.5 gigabytes. We’ll be talking about a storage of 8 to 16 GB. This would make the Galaxy Mega this biggest smartphone to exist on the market as of today, even beating Huawei’s Ascend Mate smartphone.
Skeptical comments so far
Readers who found the news on Mashable’s tech blog had mixed comments on the report. A lot of people seem not to understand why the main phone producers are fighting each other to build bigger and bigger screens. Why would you actually get a smartphone that doesn’t even fit in a pocket? Some users of the Galaxy Note (5.3 inches display) have reported that they could barely bend over with the product in their pants, which is indeed somewhat frustrating. The lack of stylus in the manufacturer’s offer (even though it could change before the real launch) also didn’t make sense from potential buyers, who feel like such a big device will have comfort issues.
Enthusiastic consumers, though, gave the argument that people don’t use smartphones to call anymore. Bigger screens allow watching movies, enjoying the web experience a bit more as well as editing pictures. With the Mega, why would you get a tablet if your phone can do everything?
0.7 inch less than the smaller tablets
With its gigantic size, it’s still nebulous whether the Samsumg Galaxy Mega will try to position itself as a smartphone or a hybrid product, a “smart-blet”. The difference with some tablets such as the Nexus 7 (7 inches display) is so small that it becomes very hard to draw an official boundary between these two types of products. Eventually, it will become necessary to create a new line of products to include mammoth smartphones.
The struggle of Samsung against Apple
This new launch comes as Samsung is having a hard time fighting the worldwide popularity of the iPhones. A recent article posted on Marketingland indicated that Apple’s smartphone market shares increased from 35% to 38.9% between November and February, while Samsung’S shares went from 20.3% to 21.3%. It is still a small victory for the Korean manufacturer, but Apple is clearly gaining the most from HTC’s and Motorola’s demise.
April 16, 2013 at 7:53 am
Comletely agree to your point…It seems Samsung has decided to make every possible inch gadget between the general smartphone category and the tablets category… New name would be smaller phablet an bigger phablet
April 16, 2013 at 11:28 am
I think the idea that a smartphone is for making voice calls is becoming obsolete. Everything you can do with a smartphone works better if the display is bigger, so it makes perfect sense that smartphones will converge with tablets.
April 16, 2013 at 2:37 pm
Thanks for your impressions! I do agree that voice calls are losing popularity (or people do them using small headphone with an integrated speaker).
What bugs me with this phone, though, is that I could not carry it in all my jeans’ pockets 😛
April 16, 2013 at 3:03 pm
6.3 inches is a bit too much. There should be some cut off point in my view.
April 16, 2013 at 4:50 pm
I don’t get this new trend, why should phones be even bigger? I usually hold my phone in my pocket, what should I do with this monster?
April 16, 2013 at 5:38 pm
Soon, you might see men carrying a purse around for their phone!
April 17, 2013 at 12:33 pm
Nice post and Yes, these new upcoming are really bigger in size but they are loaded with lots of new features and also seems better than others. We all have high expectation with these. Thanks for sharing this post.
April 17, 2013 at 1:10 pm
totally agree with morris..,
today we are forgetting the main idea behind a mobile phone, we are rarely using or buying it for voice calls…, we are just running behind the specifications..
nice article BTW..:)
April 21, 2013 at 3:00 pm
galaxy mega looks like a tablet, thinks like Samsung is confused whether to call it a tablet or phablet. 😛 😛


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Mark your calendars for the first of two 2019 Free Fishing Days in California,
Saturday, July, 6, and Saturday, August 31, when anyone can try their hand at angling - no fishing license required. If you would like to fish the rest of the year, you can purchase a license online through CDFW’s website.
“Free Fishing Day is a great opportunity for seasoned anglers to introduce friends and neighbors to their love of the sport,” said California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) Director Charlton H. Bonham.
Lake Success is open every day for fishing said Temporary Park Manager Charlie Muldin, Corps of Engineers. There is shoreline access from sunrise to sunset, and fishing on boats is allowed after sunset, if the boat has all it’s lights and follows all the boating laws, that are in effect during the day.
Currently Rocky Hill is closed.
A basic annual resident sport fishing license in California currently costs $49.94, while a one-day sport fishing license costs $16.20. CDFW offers two Free Fishing Days each year - usually around the Fourth of July and Labor Day weekend - when it’s legal to fish without either an annual or one-day license. This year, the first of the two Free Fishing Days falls on the Saturday, July 6, of Independence Day weekend. The second will be on Saturday, Aug. 31, 2019.
All fishing regulations, such as bag and size limits, gear restrictions, report card requirements, fishing hours and stream closures remain in effect. Every angler must have an appropriate report card if they are fishing for steelhead or sturgeon anywhere in the state.
Anglers can review the sport fishing regulations online (www.wildlife.ca.gov/regulations) or use CDFW’s mobile web site to view limits and regulations specific to a body of water (https://map.dfg.ca.gov/sportfishingregs).


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SVG SportsTech On Demand: The Studio - B&H's Michel Suissa on Meeting the New Demands of the Sports Video Industry
In an effort to keep the broadcast-technology community informed this spring, throughout April, SVG is hosting a series of SportsTech On Demand video interviews with executives from the industry’s top technology vendors discussing their latest product releases and company news. Our Brandon Costa sat down with Michel Suissa, managing director, The Studio – B&H, about the company’s recent activity.
Headquartered in New York City, the popular B&H store is naturally closed but the company is remaining as active as ever, meeting the purchasing needs of video content creators across the globe. The Studio-B&H, meanwhile, is continuing to support its high-end sports media clients with desperately needed technology supplies. In addition, the company is continuing to build critical vendor partnerships, most recently striking a deal with Ncam, a leading provider of camera tracking and augmented reality solutions, to serve the sports broadcasting community. They have also solidified partnership with key vendors like ARRI and MultiDyne, bridging the gap between sports and entertainment with the use of large sensor camera and optics.


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Based on the latest Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS (Bionic Beaver) release, the new Ubuntu Desktop image is now available for installation from the Microsoft Hyper-V gallery on Windows 10 Pro computers. It comes with a pre-configured xRDP server for communication with Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection (RDP) protocol for allowing Windows 10 Pro users to experience the full Ubuntu Desktop running in Hyper-V as a virtual machine.
Thanks to the work done by Microsoft upstream to enhance the xRDP server, the bootable Hyper-V image of Ubuntu Desktop 18.04.1 LTS with Enhanced Session Mode support will bring dynamic desktop resizing, improved clipboard integration, better mouse experience to seamlessly move between the Windows 10 Pro host and the guest Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS desktop, as well as easier sharing of folders between the two OSes for faster file transfers.
Furthermore, these enhancements will allow Hyper-V users to use hv_sock, a byte-stream-based communication mechanism that enables high bandwidth interconnection between the host and guest operating systems. Users who want to run Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS (Bionic Beaver) on their Windows 10 Pro computers can install the Hyper-V image from the Microsoft Hyper-V Gallery. Follow the on-screen instructions to set up your Ubuntu Desktop on Hyper-V.
According to Canonical, which recently revealed the initial Ubuntu Desktop metrics gathered from users who install the latest Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system, Ubuntu Linux is used all over the world by a lot of people, and especially as a virtual machine. This is why they put a lot of work into optimizing the Ubuntu Desktop experience when running the OS a guest virtual machine on a Windows 10 Pro desktop host.
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht


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Nokia announced that it has completed its acquisition of Enpocket, a global leader in mobile advertising providing technology and services that allow brands to plan, create, execute, measure and optimize mobile advertising campaigns around the world.
"The Enpocket acquisition is a logical step in establishing Nokia as a leader in Internet services. With the close of this transaction, we will create an exciting business focusing on advertising, offering a strong suite of services and solutions to enable brands, publishers, telecom operators and others to run targeted advertising and marketing campaigns for mobile audiences," said Tero Ojanperä, Chief Technology Officer, Nokia.
The Nokia vision for mobile advertising is to build the largest, high-quality advertising marketplace; offering advertisers global, targeted reach; offering mobile operators and publishers a simple way to monetize their mobile assets; and offering consumers access to rich, interactive, and valuable content which is available via relevant, interesting and appropriate advertising.
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Spain has four Balearic islands and they are all famous for different things, but Ibiza reigns as the “party capital”. But it’s family-friendly sister Mallorca could be challenging that title- with the announcement of a brand new hotel complex designed specifically for “clubbing holidays”; that will “rival the celebrated world greats in Ibiza in terms of open air concerts and line-ups” opening May 1, 2015.
The Mallorca Rocks Hotel has reopened after €10 million dollar investment and reopened as BH Mallorca including luxury rooms, an open-air festival venue built around a pool, The Island Beach Club, also built around a pool, the world’s first ever, over 18 Water Park in the very center; including nine “white knuckle” slides and a wave pool.
There will be unlimited access to all three areas as part of the package as well as free food and drink between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. and the line ups have been partly announced including Hardwell, Steve Angello, Rudimental, Axwell and more.
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US social network Facebook has won a trademark case in China against a local company, state media reported Monday, weeks after a court ruled against tech giant Apple in a similar suit over its iPhone brand.
A US judge on Thursday rejected a request by Facebook to toss out a civil suit accusing it of violating privacy with face-recognition software to help "tag" people in pictures.
Humans are so passe. Facebook now wants to expand your social circle in its messaging app, Messenger, beyond friends to include robots - or chatbots - that are powered by artificial intelligence, and designed to shop, search ...
Fresh from reporting stellar earnings, Facebook on Thursday rolled out applications tailored to Microsoft's latest operating system for the social network as well as its Messenger and Instagram services.
Online troublemakers tend to be socially well connected. Some Facebook users therefore, remain friends online with troublemakers because they are worried about the repercussions if they 'unfriend' them.
It's now possible—though neither easy nor particularly convenient—to buy stuff on Facebook via automated messaging "bots." But it's far from clear that people really want to go shopping on the social network.
Facebook on Wednesday fielded a plan to tighten Mark Zuckerberg's grip on the helm as the booming social network reported stellar profit.
When an organization experiences stressful or unexpected news, does it use its social networks to reach out or to hunker down?
Let's say you're scrolling through your favorite social media app and you come across a series of pictures of a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a long white dress.
After taking to the air with drones to provide Internet to remote spots, Facebook on Wednesday unveiled new land-based systems to provide connectivity to people in urban settings.


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- Base Oils
INEOS to expand high viscosity PAO unit in LaPorte, Texas
Following the start-up of its low viscosity poly alpha olefin (PAO) unit in Chocolate Bayou, Texas, U.S.A., INEOS announced a major expansion of its high viscosity (HV) PAO unit, in LaPorte, Texas.
The increased capacity of the HV PAO plant will meet the significant demand for wind turbines and other industrial applications.
The unit was initially built with a nameplate capacity of 20,000 tonnes per annum (tpa) but was engineered to allow efficient expansion to support anticipated sales growth. It was debottlenecked for the first time last year to reach 25,000 tpa. The phased expansion will bring its capacity to nearly 40,000 tpa by mid-2025.
The unit’s production is based on a metallocene high viscosity PAO technology.
In comparison to conventional materials, these decene-based metallocene products have a number of superior attributes such as higher viscosity indices, lower pour points, higher shear stability and lower Brookfield viscosities.
“To date, the business has been a great success story for us, given the strong demand for wind turbines and other industrial applications. Customers like the options our products give them in the development of advanced new lubricant formulations,” said Peter Steylaerts, business director, INEOS Oligomers.
This is the second significant announcement from INEOS Oligomers, which recently started up its new 120,000 tpa low viscosity PAO unit in Chocolate Bayou, Texas. The facility is the world’s largest single PAO train. It positions INEOS Oligomers as the world’s largest merchant supplier of LV PAO with an unprecedented production footprint in LV PAO.
“Our world-scale capacity expansions in both LV and HV PAO, together with their corresponding LAO feedstock, underscore our market leadership. We have secured the growth aspirations of our customers for many years to come. These investments are a component of the ongoing INEOS Oligomers’ organic growth strategy that will ultimately double the size of our business,” said Joe Walton, CEO, INEOS Oligomers.


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While IT industry in India is facing an attrition issue, skills shortage is a bigger concern that needs to be addressed first.
IT major Cognizant has raised its revenue growth guidance into double digits due to strong demand for its services, but attrition remains a key concern for the US-based company that has over two thirds of its employees in India.
The company’s revenue of $4.6 billion grew 14.6% year-on-year in the second quarter, its best quarterly revenue so far, Cognizant CEO Brian Humphries said while sharing the company’s Q2 2021 financial results. But the company reported an attrition rate of 31% in the second quarter, the highest among IT services companies in the quarter ending June 30.
While Cognizant’s attrition rate is higher than the industry average, for the quarter ended June, TCS’s attrition rate stood at 8.6%, Infosys was at 13.9%, Wipro at 15.5% and HCL Tech’s attrition stood at 11.8%. Accenture had reported 17% attrition in the March to May quarter.
Attrition a key concern in IT sector
IT industry body Nasscom stated in a report published in June that the sector remained a net hirer of skilled talent, where the top 5 Indian IT companies have planned to loop in additional 96,000 employees during the year 2021-22, indicating the IT job market is witnessing a boom time. This very trend is also leading to high attrition with industry analysts anticipating a 22-23% attrition rate in 2021, which works out to one million resignations on a projected base of 4.6 million IT employees. Between January and March, 5-8% of full-time employees who were onboarded left within the first 90 days as per an ET report.
Prasad Rajappan, Founder of ZingHR sees that companies are building new business models to thrive in the pandemic times. These new models have led to an increase in the demand for specialists in artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud computing, big data and automation to work on various projects. The industry has seen an almost 30-35 percent growth in the recruitment of these skills this year.
For example, Infosys has unveiled a new set of Enterprise Agile DevOps capabilities that will help businesses strengthen customer centricity and innovation. According to the IT services major, the product-centric value delivery model and the data-centric live engineering approach that helps enterprises drive business value faster while being secure by design. As Ravi Kumar S, President, Infosys explains that forward thinking firms are now evolving to a product centric operating model to ingrain customer centricity, business agility and innovation in the fabric of their organizations.
So needless to say that high attrition rates points to the maturing of Indian IT industry. Earlier, Infosys Chief Operating Officer Pravin Rao said the high attrition reflects the strong demand environment. IT companies have seen improved bottom lines since the December quarter as workforces have shifted online, he added.
The job market is exploding with new companies and startups willing to pay competitive packages. Smaller companies are in the market for the best talents. The industry is warming up to a blended work model. 70% of the survey respondents expect to have higher prevalence of remote work along with boost in gig workforce in 2021.
A Crisil report last month also sees the $100 billion IT services sector is staging a strong recovery this fiscal, with revenue growth of 10-11%. The improvement will ride on accelerating digital transformation services, as the analyst firm sees that forward-looking IT companies are ramping up their digital capabilities to keep up with the times.
Persisting skills gap to be addressed
The problem however is although the workforce is catching up in terms of skills, it is still falling short of bridging the supply demand gap. A new IDC report finds AI/ML to be the most critical technology skill that Indian organizations plan to acquire in the next six months – but how they can reduce the AI skills gap is indeed a million-dollar question.
“About 76% of respondents stated that lack of skill sets in employees’ impacts customer experience or customer satisfaction and profit growth,” says Rishu Sharma, Associate Research Director, Cloud and AI at IDC India. For example, the study found that about 74% of the enterprises stated that lack of skill impedes overall innovation. According to the study, about 30% of organizations plan to focus on AI/ML as the key areas to hire or reskill their workforce in the next six months and about 50% of respondents find it significantly difficult to develop softer, non-technical skills in the next six months.
And it is not just AI skills that are a challenge for companies. In fact a recent Nasscom study points to the fact that India’s IT sector is facing a talent crunch for niche digital skills despite the demand for digital transformation deals are rising in the post-covid era. IT firms are witnessing a 30% growth in digital deals, an 80% jump in cloud spending and a 15% rise in customer experience spending since the coronavirus outbreak, according to the IT industry’s apex body.
An ISACA study done in partnership with HCL Technologies said in its India findings that nearly 50% of the companies surveyed have unfilled positions in the domain of cybersecurity, with 46% of respondents indicating that their cybersecurity teams are understaffed and another 53% saying their cybersecurity applicants are not well qualified.
Whether it is AI, analytics, cybersecurity or any advanced technology capabilities, the key priority for IT companies is to immediately address the skills gap, which in turn can address the attrition issue to a large extent. Upskilling and reskilling workforce is definitely the answer to this crisis, coupled with high perks and a strong leadership. In the current scenario however, it is now up to the IT industry to tackle the dual problem of attrition and skills gap to stay ahead in the race.